Dialogues of Sorrow:
Passions on the death of Prince Henry, 1612Robert RAMSEY(fl.1616-1644)
When David heard [2:29]
What Tears, dear Prince? [3:35] Thomas FORD(d.1648)
‘Tis Now Dead Night [4:03] William CRANFORD(d. c.1645)
Weep, weep Britons [4:18] John WARD(c.1589-1638)
No Object Dearer [5:02] John COPRARIO(c.1570/80-1626)
From Songs of Mourning: O Grief (to the most sacred King
James) [3:22] O Poor distracted World (to the World) [2:47] Thomas WEELKES(c.1575-1623)
O Jonathan, Woe is me [2:15]
When David Heard [3:55] Richard DERING(c.1580-1630)
And the King was moved [2:16] Contristatus est David [2:24] Thomas VAUTO(U)R(fl.1600-1620)
Melpomene, bewail [4:22] Robert RAMSEY
How are the Mighty fall’n [5:34]
Sleep Fleshly Birth [5:40] John COPRARIO
From Songs of Mourning: So Parted You (to the most princely
and virtuous Elizabeth) [4:25]
When Pale Famine (to the most disconsolate Great Britain) [2:54]
Thomas TOMKINS(1572-1656)
Then David mourned [2:56]
When David heard [3:51] John WARD
Weep forth your Tears [4:37]
Gallicantus (Amy Moore and Clare Wilkinson (soprano); Mark Chambers
and David Allsopp (countertenor); Christopher Watson and Matthew
Long (tenor); Gabriel Crouch and William Gaunt (bass)) with Elizabeth
Kenny (lute)/Gabriel Crouch
rec. St Michael’s Church, Summertown, Oxford, 1-4 January
2010. DDD.
Texts included.
SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD210 [70:46]

Before listening to this latest offering from Gallicantus and
Signum, I did something that I had been meaning to do for some
time: I listened to the earlier Gallicantus recording of the
Hymns, Psalms and Lamentations of Robert White on Signum
SIGCD134, reviewed by Robert Hugill earlier this year - see
review.
I obtained that earlier recording via download from eMusic.
The eight tracks cost just under £2 for those on the old
50-track-per-month tariff in perfectly acceptable mp3 sound
(all the tracks are at 224 or 225kb/s). It’s also available
from classicsonline and to stream from the Naxos Music Library.
The eMusic download comes without notes or texts but Signum
generously provide a pdf version of their booklet to all comers
on their website, also available to classicsonline purchasers
and to subscribers to the Naxos Music Library: this allows listeners
to correct some mistakes on the eMusic website, where the hymn
Christe qui lux es et dies is bizarrely transformed twice
to Christe qui Lex es e Dies - Christ the Law of the
day, not its Light. (Classicsonline and the Naxos Library get
it right.)

I fell completely under the spell of that earlier recording:
as Robert Hugill says, we are not blest with so many recordings
of the music of White, whom I have long felt to be a much undervalued
composer, that we can afford to overlook the Gallicantus recording,
even though the music would have been conceived for a rather
larger group than the eight voices on that CD. There are just
a few excellent versions on White’s music in the catalogue,
notably his 5-part Lamentations sung by the Tallis Scholars
on Gimell CDGIM996 (see my March 2010 Download Roundup),
where the music is by no means shamed by the Lamentations
of Tallis and Palestrina, but I echo RH’s call for more
of his music from Gallicantus. His 6-part setting of Lamentations,
the longest work on the earlier Signum CD, rounds off a most
desirable collection.

The Tallis Scholars’ version of White’s 5-part Lamentations
also features on a budget-price 2-CD Gimell set, with his Magnificat
and other music: The Tallis Scholars sing Tudor Music
Volume 2, CDGIM210, Bargain of the Month - see review.
There are also very fine performances of the 5-part Lamentations
from The Sixteen (Treasures of Tudor England, Coro COR16056)
and the Oxford Camerata (Naxos 8.550572, with Tallis, Palestrina
and Lasso.).

One small point: Robert Hugill echoes the statement in the Signum
booklet that White’s chosen setting of Lamentations 1
would have had no liturgical significance in Elizabethan England,
but the 1549 and 1552 editions of the Book of Common Prayer
prescribe Lamentations 1 for Evensong on Wednesday in Holy Week.
Although the lessons for Holy Week in the Elizabethan (1559)
book are different, it may have become the custom in cathedrals
and colleges, where Latin was permitted - even usual - for parts
of the service, to continue to sing this chapter in Latin in
Holy Week.

The music on the new CD is more varied in that it contains the
works of several composers, but more limited in that it was
all written at around the time of the death of Prince Henry
in 1612, some of it specifically linked to that event, and it
all tends to be in a kind of early-17th-century Anglican
house style. I don’t wish, however, to imply that it’s
all undifferentiated gloom - far from it. William Byrd’s
laments for Sidney (Come to me, grief for ever) and Tallis
(Ye sacred Muses) would have been a very hard act to
follow, but they set a pattern which the composers here largely
follow, with variations. Robin Blaze’s recording of the
Byrd, incidentally, with Concordia, has been consigned to Hyperion’s
special-order Archive facility, though it remains available
to download in mp3 or flac for £7.99 (CDA67397). It doesn’t
deserve to languish: I hope that it will return on the budget
Helios label.

Even more than the death of Prince Arthur a century earlier,
which led to his younger brother becoming heir and subsequently
King Henry VIII, that of Prince Henry in 1612, probably from
typhoid contracted from a swim in the Thames, provoked a bout
of sorrow which was certainly genuine at least to a degree in
that he had been the white-hot hope of the nation. It also had
repercussions well beyond that year, since Henry might just
have had the strength of temperament to have prevented the civil
war which his younger brother Charles I provoked. Sir Walter
Ralegh, imprisoned in the Tower by King James for his opposition
to the policy of peace with Spain, certainly lost his last influential
supporter and his execution became inevitable, especially after
he was released for his second, abortive expedition to Guyana,
on which some Spaniards were killed.

Some of the composers are better known for music in another
style: John Coprario, for example, is better known to me at
least for his instrumental music. His Italianate name, incidentally,
is one of the affectations of that age - he was, in fact, plain
John Cooper. Some, like Prætorius, whose real name was
Schultheiss, went one better and Latinised their names. Similarly,
the only music by John Ward which I had encountered before consisted
of madrigals and instrumental music (notably his consort music
recorded by Phantasm on Linn CKD339: Recording of the Month
- see review
and my October 2009 Download
Roundup).

Robert Ramsey, represented here by four works (trs. 1-2, 13-14)
was a completely new composer to me. It is by no means certain
that his two pieces which open the CD relate to the death of
Prince Henry; if so, they predate his Cambridge graduation in
1616. Two of the contributors to the Passions on the Death
of Prince Henry were also unknown to me: Thomas Ford (tr.3)
and William Cranford (tr.4). There are now just three CDs in
the current catalogue with music by Ford, including this, and
none, other than the current disc, that I can find with anything
by Cranford or Ramsey. Their music may be rather more workaday
than that of Weelkes and Tomkins, but it is well worth hearing.
I have no benchmarks for these pieces, but no reason to believe
that any rival versions would outshine the present offerings.

The composers and works represented here do, however, contain
a fair proportion of the familiar, such as Thomas Weelkes’
anthem When David heard that Absalom was slain (track
9), and Thomas Tomkins’ setting of the same text (track
18), rightly regarded as among the jewels of Anglican music
as it was settling down after the upheavals of the 16th
century.

Thomas Tomkins’ setting of When David heard has
been recorded on three excellent all-Tomkins CDs - by Alamire
and David Skinner: These Distracted Times (Obsidian OBSID-CD702)
and both When David heard and Then David mourned
by St George’s Chapel Windsor (Hyperion Helios CDH55066)
and by the Tallis Scholars on another all-Tomkins CD, coupled
with his Great Service (Gimell CDGIM024). Tomkins’
and Weelkes’s settings of When David heard also
figure on a recording of the music of Thomas Weelkes, Orlando
Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins (King’s College Cambridge/Stephen
Cleobury, EMI 3944302). (Please see The Tallis Scholars at
30 - review here.)

Like the new Signum recording, the EMI places Tomkins in context
with his near-contemporaries in performances by the kind of
choir which the composers would have had in mind. As such, it’s
complementary to the smaller groups on the Gimell, Obsidian
and Signum recordings. In my article on the complete Gimell
catalogue I noted that there is quite a variety of tempo for
Tomkins’ When David heard, with Alamire taking
just 3:58, the Tallis Scholars 4:27, St George’s 5:00
and King’s 5:01, yet all sound excellent within context.
Gallicantus continue the pattern of the smallest groups adopting
the fastest tempi: they take the shortest time of all (3:51).
Their time of 2:56 for Then David mourned is very much
in line with the Gimell and Hyperion recordings, but their much
faster time for When David heard in no way sells the
music short, retaining all the pathos of the piece and also
injecting plenty of drama into it. In fact, the Tomkins items
on the new recording serve to complicate an already difficult
choice among so many fine recordings of these two minor masterpieces.

Thomas Weelkes’ setting of When David heard is
also included on the EMI King’s recording: again Gallicantus
(tr.9), with a smaller group and unhindered by the Cambridge
reverberation, take this at a swifter pace than King’s
without any loss of its affective power.

As on the White recording, Gallicantus consists here of a small
ensemble of eight singers, though it’s a different group
of eight, since the line-up includes two sopranos, not present
on the earlier CD. Whether solo or as a group, the singing is
every bit as good as on the earlier White programme. They are
very well supported in some of the pieces by Elizabeth Kenny
on the lute.

The recording is very good throughout. The notes are detailed
and informative, both about the political background, including
the identification of James I with King David, and about the
music. The coloured engraving of Prince Henry on the cover adds
to the sense of a fine production. I deduct a few Brownie points,
however, for the failure to include the composers’ dates
and for the implication in the title, modified in the booklet,
that all the music was composed directly for the death of the
Prince.

Don’t be put off at the prospect of 71 minutes of laments
from a group of composers whose styles, though not markedly
varied to the modern ear, contain more variety than I may have
given you cause to think. Go for the earlier Gallicantus recording
of the music of Robert White first, but those who already own
that should head straight for the new CD.

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